Bridging simulation and reality in subsurface radar-based sensing: physics-guided hierarchical domain adaptation with deep adversarial learning

Accurate estimation of subsurface material properties, such as soil moisture, is critical for wildfire risk assessment and precision agriculture. Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is a non-destructive geophysical technique widely used to characterize subsurface conditions. Data-driven parameter estimation methods typically require large amounts of labeled training data, which is expensive to obtain from real-world GPR scans under diverse subsurface conditions. A physics-based GPR model using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method can be employed to generate large synthetic datasets through simulations across varying material parameters, which are then utilized to train data-driven models. A key limitation, however, is that simulated data (source domain) and real-world data (target domain) often follow different distributions, which can cause data-driven models trained on simulations to underperform in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, this study proposes a novel physics-guided hierarchical domain adaptation framework with deep adversarial learning for robust subsurface material property estimation from GPR signals. The proposed framework is systematically evaluated through the laboratory tests for single- and two-layer materials, as well as the field tests for single- and two-layer materials, and is benchmarked against state-of-the-art methods, including the one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D CNN) and domain adversarial neural network (DANN). The results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves higher correlation coefficients R and lower Bias between the predicted and measured parameter values, along with smaller standard deviations in the estimations, thereby validating their effectiveness in bridging the domain gap between simulated and real-world radar signals and enabling efficient subsurface material property retrieval.